Elon Musk suggests nuking Mars to warm it up … the fast way

Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet from our perspective, as Elon Musk told Stephen Colbert Wednesday on Late Night. It’s got some of the basics: Water (both surface and subsurface ice), sunlight (naturally) …

Nuke it? (Getty Images)

As Universe Today adds: “Both planets have roughly the same amount of land surface area, sustained polar caps, and both have a similar tilt in their rotational axes, affording each of them strong seasonal variability.”

But, there are a lot of problems … low gravity, low atmospheric pressure and it’s dang cold. Not to mention constant bombardment of solar radiation.

So, is it worth trying to go to Mars? Or, are human Martians destined to live in shelters for however long they are on the Red Planet?

Musk thinks there’s a way to increase atmospheric pressure (necessary for liquid water) and temperature. Here’s the conversation between Musk and Colbert (from the video below):

Colbert: You sincerely think we should go to Mars, that men and women should go to Mars. Why do we want to go to Mars? It’s uninhabitable.

Musk: It’s very inhospitable, that’s true.

Colbert: You have to be in domes …

Musk: Initially.

Colbert: Really? How long before we can turn Mars into someplace where we can live.

Musk: It is a fixer-upper of a planet. So at first you’re going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet. … You’d warm it up. … there’s a fast way and a slow way. The fast way is drop thermal nuclear weapons over the poles.

Colbert: You’re a super villain. That’s what a super villain does.

Ha, well. Basically, he’s saying we’d have to reverse the process that left Mars without much of an atmosphere. And blowing a lot of that frozen water as vapor, carbon and other stuff into the air might just do it. Otherwise, we’ll need to go the “slow way” of pumping those greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere though machines or microbes.